Team

Professor Howard Hotson

Howard Hotson is Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, based at St Anne’s College. He has published widely on the intellectual movements and networks of the early modern world and is the director of the EU COST Action Reassembling the Republic of Letters. In consultation with the Steering Committee he sets and oversees our overall direction, and also supervises our Postdoctoral Fellows.

Miranda Lewis

Miranda Lewis has worked as an editor and copy-writer for publishers, museums, libraries, and on a wide range of online resources. A post-graduate of the Courtauld Institute, where she focussed on sixteenth-century French portrait drawings, she takes responsibility for the metadata and catalogues within EMLO, works with the project’s scholarly contributors, and trains and manages the Digital Fellows.

Charlotte Marique

Charlotte Marique spent four happy months as an intern with Cultures of Knowledge in Spring 2014. She completed her BA and MA at Université de Liège (Belgium), where her master’s thesis focused on Czech contemporary art. Between 2014 and 2015, she studied the correspondence and writings of sixteenth-century Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli. In April 2017, she became EMLO’s Editorial Assistant. In her free time, she enjoys music, travelling, and cooking.

Mat Wilcoxson

Mat Wilcoxson is a software engineer and has worked on various projects in BDLSS including Fihrist, First Folio, and Genizah. He has recently completed a BSc in Physics at the Open University and previously obtained a BSc in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence at the University of Essex. He hopes one day to fly to Mars.

EMLO Digital Fellows, Visiting Scholars, and Associates

Cristiano Amendola

Cristiano Amendola is a DPhil. student in Italian Philology at ‘Transitions. Unité de recherches sur le Moyen Âge et la Première Modernité’ at Liège University, where he is also one of the editors for the EpistolART Project. His personal research is focused on rhetorical and material aspects of letter-writing during the Italian Renaissance, he is a member of the research group directed by Professor Paola Moreno, working on the critical edition of Francesco Guicciardini’s letters. Currently he is preparing a critical edition of Felice Feliciano’s autograph letters.

Ólafur H. Árnason

Ólafur H. Árnason is a doctoral student in Classics at the University of Oxford. He holds a BA in Latin and Medieval Studies from the University of Iceland and a Master’s degree in Classical Latin from the University of Copenhagen. Before coming to Oxford, Ólafur worked at the manuscript department of the Royal Danish Library. His research interests include the history of ideas and political theory, as well as manuscript studies and the Middle Ages in Northern Europe. He is currently working on the correspondence of the Danish scholar Ole Worm (1588–1654).

Dr Antonia Bertschinger

Antonia Bertschinger holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Basel and an MA in War in the Modern World from King’s College, London. She has worked as a human rights expert, as an academic project manager, and as a journalist. Currently, she is researching and writing a historical novel set in the Grisons region of Switzerland in the 17th century, which involves a lot of manuscript sources in different scripts and languages as well as ordering and structuring people and complex series of events. Working on EMLO metadata fits in perfectly with this research.

Dr Mary Chadwick

Mary Chadwick gained her PhD in eighteenth-century British literature from Aberystwyth University. Her research, the subject of her forthcoming book, explores national and gendered identities as they are apparent in the manuscript cultures of British gentry communities, with a particular focus on Welsh men and women. Subsequently, Mary has worked with early modern correspondence on The Mostyn Project and The Anne Clifford Project.

Dr Randolph Cock

Randolph Cock studied psychology and artificial intelligence before becoming a computer programmer and sometime motorcycling fiend. His doctorate concerned science and the Royal Navy, and he is the co-author, with Prof. Nicholas Rodger, of A Guide to the Naval Records in the National Archives of the UK. He has been a Research Fellow at Exeter and Liverpool Universities and, for EMLO, has worked on the letters of Edward Lhwyd and Henry Oldenburg.

Cristina Erquiaga

Cristina Erquiaga is a doctoral student at the University of Salamanca. In her thesis she examines the network of the Spanish intellectual Miguel de Unamuno through the lens of his correspondence and looks at the role of intellectuals in nation-building, the international networks of correspondence, and the importance of culture in international relations. Her work in EMLO focusses on the correspondence of the Spanish humanists Juan Luis Vives and Hernán Núñez [El Pinciano].

Dr Antonio Geremicca

Antonio Geremicca attained a doctorate in Art History at the University of Pisa in 2011. He was an Associate Fellow at the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence and a postdoctoral researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. In 2013 he achieved a two-year Marie Curie Cofunded post-doc fellowship at the University of Liège where currently he is involved with EpistolART, a research project which focuses on the letters of Renaissance artists.

Dr Luca Guariento

Luca Guariento was awarded BA and MA in Musicology at the University of Bologna, Italy. Following his master dissertation which focussed on Robert Fludd’s De templo musicæ (1618), he continued and widened the horizons of his research on Fludd’s philosophy with a PhD at the University of Glasgow. He is currently Systems Developer for the Bass Culture in Scottish Musical Traditions and Project Assistant for The Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen.

Lucy Hennings

Lucy Hennings holds a BA (Hons) in History and a MSt in Medieval History from the University of Oxford, where she is now working on her doctorate. Her research explores the ways in which administrative networks of learned clerks transmitted papal rhetoric into the government of Henry III. She is particularly interested in dictaminal practice and the importance of letter-writing style. In her free time she enjoys reading, travelling, and embroidery.

Katharina Herold

Katharina Herold has recently finished her MSt English Literature 1830–1914 at Oxford University where she is currently researching her DPhil project, which investigates the ways in which Orientalism features in English-German Decadent writing. Despite her 19th-century focus, she has a keen interest in palaeography and pre-1900 century material, especially early modern correspondence. When back home in Bavaria, she enjoys transcribing 16th-century legal documents for the local city archive together with her father.

Dr Alex Hitchman

Alex Hitchman has recently completed his PhD — which looked at legal and religious justifications used in cheap print during the first English civil war — at the University of Sheffield. He is interested in the relationships between ideas and events and those between law and politics, and in using bibliographic and typographic techniques to identify the printers of anonymously printed works. His future research will focus on royalism, especially the polemical writing of Edward Hyde

Dr Karen Hollewand

Karen Hollewand gained her DPhil in History at the University of Oxford. She was born in Groningen and moved to Oxford for her doctoral studies. Her thesis concentrated on Dutch humanist scholar Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716), who was banished from the Dutch Republic in 1679 for his radical ideas on sex, the Bible, and the Classics, and who spent most of his life in exile in England. In addition to studying history, she loves to play volleyball, to eat sushi, to watch the Tour de France, to read biographies, and to drink coffee with Miranda in the office.

Owen Hubbard

Owen Hubbard holds a BA in Music and an MSt in Musicology from the University of Oxford, and commenced his PhD at the University of Chicago in September 2016. His research interests comprise two related strands: firstly, theories of intertextuality and aesthetic (non-)autonomy in European modernist musical composition; and, secondly, the reception and repurposing of Western art music in late-twentieth-century and contemporary society.

Marc Kolakowski

Marc Kolakowski, a doctoral student at Université de Lausanne, spent the academic year of 2014–2015 as an intern with EMLO in Oxford, funded by a Doctoral Mobility Study Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS). Marc divided his time between his research on Johann Wilhelm Stucki and work in EMLO on closely related correspondences of Swiss Reformed academics, such as Theodor Zwinger and Amandus Polanus. He is a keen hiker and skier, and a valued member of the team.

Dr Iva Lelkova

Iva Lelková received her PhD at Charles University in Prague in 2011. She took part in the Mapping the Republic of Letters project as a Fulbright grantee at Stanford University where she worked on Athanasius Kircher’s correspondence. She was a Comenius fellow in the Cultures of Knowledge project between 2010 and 2015, working on the correspondence of J. A. Comenius and on the prosopography of the Hartlib circle. She is interested in early modern intellectual history and the history of science.

Dr Rhys Kaminski-Jones

Rhys Kaminski-Jones has recently completed a PhD at the University of Wales, having previously gained a BA in English at Oxford and an MA in Eighteenth Century Studies at York. His doctoral thesis examines the role of Ancient Britons in Welsh and British identities during the long eighteenth century. As a Welsh-speaking English graduate researching British cultural history, he is particularly interested in the relationship between anglophone and Celtic-speaking cultures, in literary antiquarianism and Romanticism, and in the politics of Celtic revivalism. He is delighted to be working with EMLO, whose catalogue of Edward Lhwyd’s letters makes his life immeasurably easier.

Katie McKeogh

Katie McKeogh is a doctoral student in the History Faculty working on culture and identity in the circle of Sir Thomas Tresham (1543–1605) and is interested in early modern religious and cultural history more broadly. She is co-convenor of a research network at TORCH (Early Modern Catholicism) and has presented her research at numerous conferences and seminars.

Brett Mottram

Brett Mottram is studying for an MA in the Culture of the European Renaissance at Warwick, having completed his BA in English Literature at UEA. His wide interests in early modern cultural and intellectual history, especially in the reception of the classical world, often lead him towards Renaissance Italy, but his internship at EMLO in the summer of 2017 rekindled his other love for the varied world of seventeenth-century scholarship.

Dr Callum Seddon

Callum Seddon gained his DPhil in English at the University of Oxford, having previously studied at the University of Edinburgh. His thesis was a study of manuscript circulation and textual transmission, with a particular focus on the poet William Strode (1601/2–1645). His other research interests include seventeenth-century drama and poetry, manuscript verse miscellanies, and textual editing.

Kat Steiner

Kat Steiner studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the Queen’s College, Oxford, finishing in 2012. Under the supervision of Jackie Stedall, she wrote in her final year a dissertation on Descartes’s geometry. Now working for the Bodleian Libraries, she has completed a part-time Masters at UCL in Information Science, but she has been unable to shake off a fascination with early modern mathematics, and is thrilled to find an outlet for her enthusiasm at EMLO!

Dr Robin Usher

Robin Usher studied History and History of Art at Trinity College, Dublin, before completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. Relocating to Oxford in 2007, he was employed as a researcher for the AHRC-supported project ‘Scottish Urban Society in the Enlightenment, 1745–1820’, while converting his thesis into a monograph (Protestant Dublin, 1660–1760: Architecture and Iconography [2012]). After completing a research fellowship at Oxford Brookes, Robin worked for Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education as a tutor in architectural history. His current interest lies in the attempts of early modern intellectuals to visualize the buildings and topographies of Biblical Israel.

Tim Wade

Tim Wade is a current MPhil student at the History Faculty. His work centres on ideas surrounding conscience, heresy, and faith in the work of Thomas More (1478–1535). More broadly, he is interested in the intellectual and religious history of the early modern period. Outside of history, he plays football and is a keen guitarist and an enthusiast of poetry and theatre.

Dr Sarah Ward

Sarah Ward’s DPhil focused on North-East Wales 1640–88: Civil War, Restoration and Revolution. She studied for it at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, after being awarded the College Scholarship (Arts) in 2014. Sarah is particularly interested in the persistent allegiance of the gentry to the Church of England and the monarchy in the 1650s and throughout the period. Her work uses large collections of family correspondence as well as official correspondence between the localities and the centre. She has written a number of A-level textbooks and worked as administrator for the Local Population Studies Society and Journal.

Helen Watt

Helen Watt studied Modern Languages at Oxford and Archives Administration at the University of Wales. She has taken part in a number of archival and research database projects, including the Welsh Manorial Records Database Project at the National Library of Wales and the E 179 Records of English and Welsh Lay and Clerical Taxation Projects. From 2010–12 she worked with CofK and CAWCS (University of Wales) on Edward Lhwyd’s correspondence and in 2017 calendared Elias Ashmole’s letters for EMLO. After work on a pilot for the Archbishops’ Registers Revealed Project at the University of York, she completed the project to index online the registers for 1576–1650.

Dr Elizabeth Williamson

Elizabeth Williamson was Digital Project Manager for Cultures of Knowledge from 2013–15 and continues to work with CofK as a consultant from her current base in Baltimore. She completed her PhD on early modern diplomatic correspondence in 2012. Her current research looks at the archival afterlife and contemporary function of letters and letter-books as part of a wider study on diplomacy and the history of political information. She is a member of the COST network ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters’. Connect with her on Twitter, Academia.edu, or LinkedIn.